According to
these garrulous parties, Ontario, the wealthiest and most populous
Province of the seven, was to welcome the invaders, bidding them
enter Canadian territory in the name of the people, and plant the
Stars and Stripes wherever they halted. Bloodshed would thus be
avoided, and everyone would soon come round to the new order of
things and take to it naturally. Quebec might perhaps object,
"but what did a few handfuls of Frenchmen matter anyway."
On the day before the election, one party was full of boisterous,
bragging insolence; the other, still steadfast, firmly clinging
to what seemed a forlorn hope. Before the ending of another day
all was changed--a complete transformation scene had taken place.
When the morning journals on the election day appeared, their news
from the United States was such a terrible chapter of accidents as
has rarely fallen to the lot of journals to publish in one day. The
President had been shot at in New York by an unemployed foreign
artisan, the night before, while leaving a mansion on Fifth Avenue.
Troubles between labor and capital, which had been brewing for
some time, had broken out in several manufacturing centres, and
were threatening to spread to all large cities. The money market
was showing signs of considerable derangement. Fearful storms and
floods were chronicled from all parts; while last, but not least,
three transports which had embarked the greater part of the "army,"
at San Francisco, that was to have "delivered" British Columbia,
had foundered in a hurricane only two miles out, dragging all the
poor deluded fellows to a watery grave.
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